As a Memory
by Abrae
Summary: A recovering Snape ventures outside in the summer after the war. Written for the 2012 Summer of Snarry challenge. Pre-slash or genfic, depending on your preference.


Two months. Snape's been cooped up in the Hospital Wing for two long months. Two months of unseasonable heat; two months of anxiety-ridden inertia as he awaits the verdict of his trial-in-absentia. Two months of enduring the Headmistress's awkward attempts to assuage her guilt. Two months of knowing that Potter - immature, irritating, infuriating _Potter_ - haunts the castle like a wraith, yet never where Snape can see him.

Not that he cares.

On the morning that Poppy clears him for a walk around the grounds, he pulls on his teaching robes for the first time since that day - gingerly, with creaking bones and stiff joints. They hang heavily on his bony frame, and he almost lets them drag him back down to his sickbed; but there's a fragrance in the air, wafting through the windows, and it draws him out almost against his will. That first day he makes it as far as the end of the corridor before panting breath and pounding heart force him to return to his bed. It's an inauspicious beginning, but the next day he pushes himself further, descending one flight of stairs, then another the next day, and the next, and the next.

On the seventh day following his release from captivity, Snape thinks a trip to the small courtyard might be in order. It's cool and calming, and he's always rather liked the tidy lawn, though he'd never admit it to anyone. He sets out slowly, shuffling through empty corridors, down silent staircases, his hand pressed flat against the ancient stone of the castle. He wishes vaguely that it would thrum, warm and alive, under his palm, but it's inert - cold. He wonders if it's a punishment.

When he arrives, it's to a sight that he should have expected, all the more horrifying for the fact that he didn't. In place of cobblestone-bordered green and trees grown lush in the summer warmth are branches, broken and burnt, and rubble that litters the yellowed grass below. The ghosts of the last battle linger here, mercifully metaphorical.

Snape's eyes travel slowly over this unanticipated landscape, its desolation seeping into his veins. He feels... responsible.

He scans the yard, spotting a hazy shadow perched on the sill of a far window, wand dangling listlessly in his hand. His shoulders droop, and his hair is long and ragged. He stares absently at the ground, and if Snape didn't know better, he'd think the man had only just wandered in from the battlefield.

It's only when a glint of sunlight reflects off wire frames perched on the man's nose that Snape realizes who this is. His intake of breath is no less sharp for being silent.

_Potter_.

The way he looks - it's worse than the dilapidated state of the courtyard, worse by far than Snape's own faltering frame. Life itself has leached from the boy, leaving him half-dead and shrouded in despair.

Snape insinuates himself into the shadows and stares at the boy from afar, his disused heart filling painfully with some strange emotion he cannot name. He iknows/i this defeated mien. He's seen it in a boy - so nearly a man - sitting cold and alone on the floor of a snow-dusted forest; he's worn it himself under the venomous glares of both friend and foe and then later, blood-soaked and forsaken.

As he observes, a bright flame catches the corner of his eye, cutting through the gloom. A girl - the youngest Weasley, if he's not mistaken (and how could he be with that hair?) - sneaks stealthily up behind the boy, her features animated with life. From where Snape stands, the contrast is stark. She is the stubborn blade of grass, determinedly pushing its way up through the ruins of destruction, and it seems to Snape that the boy he once knew and never liked should be the same. Instead, he's a stone statue, a living memorial to the dead.

Snape is appalled to find that he doesn't prefer it this way.

Even across the courtyard, he can see the way Potter stiffens as the girl's hands cover his eyes. Snape thinks her the worst kind of fool; the boy leaps up and whirls around, and to Snape's mind it's only the light tinkle of a laugh, echoing in the emptiness, that saves her from being hexed at the hand of reflexes honed not by school, but war. Only small snippets of conversation reach his ears; words like _your birthday_, _miss you_, and _please_ make practical, pretty sounds; _I'm fine_, _not yet_, _no_ are unyielding, absolute. Finally, the girl crosses her arms across her chest, standing defiantly with her hip jutted to the side. When she speaks again, Snape has no problem hearing her.

"It's _over_, Harry - you can't go on like this. You didn't kill them, you didn't even _kill_ him!"

Snape finds himself in substantial agreement despite his confusion over the girl's last words, and the world feels somehow righted again. iThere/i is the arrogant, self-absorbed boy he's known. If he can't be the best, he'll fancy himself the worst; either way, he keeps his claim to Most Misunderstood status. Snape would sneer - if he didn't hear the boy's voice carrying across the courtyard.

"Don't you think I know that?" Potter stares at her in wide-eyed disbelief for a moment, then brings his fingertips to a place just above his eye, as if warding off a headache. "That's not it - not all. Not by half."

He takes the girl's hands and leads her to the sill. They sit facing each other, the girl's face turned to his as if searching, the boy looking away. They are quieter now, but their bodies communicate nearly as well as their words - better, perhaps. Potter speaks, his words punctuated by an occasional insistent shake of his head. He avoids her eyes until the end, when he grips her hands tightly and trains his gaze on her as though willing her to understand some incomprehensible thing. Something in his words causes her to draw back - remove her hands from his - stand. She looks down on his bowed black head, and through the mist it seems to Snape like something from the past.

But instead of glaring at the boy in anger - turning her back on him with a dismissive flip of her red hair - she reaches out and strokes her fingers down his cheek. He looks up at her as her thumb brushes over a place just under the rim of his glasses. A desperate kind of hope radiates from his body.

"I'm so sorry, Gin," Potter says clearly, though his voice wavers on the words, and the girl shakes her head.

"Harry," she replies, and Snape strains to hear what she says. "There's nothing for it."

She turns and walks briskly away. Potter remains in place, the only difference between before and now the way he clutches his wand like a knife.

Snape has no idea what has just passed, and he's inclined to read into it all the adolescent _Sturm und Drang_ with which he's always faulted Potter, but for the fact that this is the vanquisher of Voldemort; this - this nearsighted, scruffy, placeholder of a man - and the thought nearly provokes a laugh from him for the first time in... god knows how long.

He has no phoenix to send to the boy, no means of offering the kind of comfort Dumbledore seemed to dispense as freely as his lemon sherbets, so he gives what little he has without knowing quite why. It's nothing so coherent as awareness or realisation, but rather a vague kind of consanguinuity that rouses the memory (_hope_) of a beloved girl (_youth_), compelling Snape to silently cast _Expecto Patronum_ into the space between them.

Potter starts when he sees the doe, jumping to his feet and looking around wild-eyed as Snape slinks deeper into the darkness. When he fails to find its source, he approaches the Patronus with his hand held out before him, palm up in invitation. And when the doe traitorously approaches the boy, he reaches out as if to stroke it, hesitating only when it seems like his too-solid fingers might slice through its ethereal form. He looks around again furtively, as though afraid to take his eyes off her, lest she vanish, and, loud enough for Snape to hear, says, "You don't know -" searches the shadows "I was so -" calls out plaintively, "_where are you_?"

Snape says nothing.

The boy returns his attention to the doe, gazing intently at it, his lips tightening along with the grip on his wand. After a moment he seems to come to a decision and mouths the incantation.

Snape has never seen the boy's Patronus before.

He knows that James's Animagus form was a stag, and the one time he spied it meandering through a secluded copse, he was unsurprised to find its bearing as arrogant and imperious as the bastard himself. But this means that he, of all people, is uniquely aware that Harry's Patronus has nothing of that swagger. The inquisitive tilt of its head as it tentatively eyes the doe - its seeming circumspection, and the way it places one ghostly hoof forward in a deferential little bow. All as unsure and unassuming as Potter himself.

And if Snape is unwilling to openly acknowledge the boy in any way, his own Patronus is not. It sidles up alongside the stag, nuzzling, head bowed, against its long, muscular neck. It offers a gentle kind of succor to the ungainly beast before it, then dissipates, too soon, into thin air. A moment later the stag is gone and, with a last sweeping glance around the courtyard, so too is Potter.

He startles awake in the darkness; it happens a lot. His heart races, and for a moment he's still in the Shack, his life seeping away. Then his eyes clear and he spies a gangly figure slumped in the chair beside his bed, bathed in pale moonlight. It sleeps, one hand resting on Snape's infirmary-issue blanket, one on a belly that rises and falls in restful rhythm.

Snape reaches out with his own shaking hand. It comes to rest on top of the boy's, and his eyes flutter open. They meet Snape's, startled and afraid until the man speaks in a gravelly voice.

"You're late, Mr. Potter. I expected you months ago."

His characteristically sardonic tone is belied by the unexpected warmth of his gaze, and Harry blinks, smiling softly to himself. He turns his hand to grasp Snape's and opens his mouth to speak. But what comes instead is a surprised, heaving sob and a suddenly bone-crushing grip. The boy lurches forward as if against his will, buries his face in Snape's side, and... keens.

After a time, Snape brings another hand - steadier now - to Harry's untameable hair and strokes it with something like acceptance.

And when the boy's muffled cries mellow to a snuffly slumber, Snape, too, sleeps.

The End


End file.
